Three students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Elton Chung Yiu-ting, Alan Wong Cheuk-lun and William Cheung Wa i-lam formed a team INFINITY and won the championship in the CodeIT Suisse 2014 competition. Organised by Credit Suisse, the competition is to offer students a coding challenge and encourage young coding talents to join its Information Technology team. Participants are required to first decrypt an encoded message containing instructions on how to apply. Then, selected teams were invited to the finals, in which they had to produce a web system for stock trading within two days, followed by a final presentation. The student winners have been interested in coding since an early age. Despite their strong passion, they still found the competition very challenging. "Time was tight and we had to work under huge pressure. Besides, we were not given many instructions, so we had to figure out many things by ourselves," said Elton. "Some of us were not familiar with principles of stock market, so I tried to explain to my teammates before we can start working. That took us a lot of time." But with great team work and cooperation, they managed to produce a decent product within limited time and won the competition. Elton said the key to success is the efficient division of labour within the team. "William is most familiar with webpage design, so he did most of the coding. Alan was responsible for research and I served as a business analyst". Speaking of the most memorable experience in the competition, they recalled rushing to the final presentation. "We were still fixing an important bug in the software when it was time for presentation. We were nervous but luckily, in the end we managed to fix it," Elton said. The three students have gained valuable experiences in the competition. Alan is proud of their product and the new attempts he has made in the competition, for example, designing the website login page. William said this experience has definitely helped them realize the importance of time management. Elton said the competition is like "running a marathon on the computer" and believes the competition has improved their ability to work under pressure and team work. After the competition, they have also developed interest in the work of the financial services sector. "At first, I thought working in such an organization would be tough but actually you get to try new technology and the work is not very rigid," William said. Elton is also impressed by the nice and friendly working atmosphere in Credit Suisse. As winners of CodelT Suisse 2014, the trio has been offered fast-tracked first round interviews for the summer internship programme at Credit Suisse. |
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